Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James by J. C. Hallman Page B

satisfaction. H’ry’s own finer interest in his description of Lake Albano—one Wm certainly should have
    sensed—would have been that it was a metaphorically
    fluid treatment of a literally fluid subject: his brother’s stream of consciousness applied toa body of water.
    Rather than taking a variety of angles on a particu-
    lar object in a futile attempt to render it factually, the description started with the impression of the lake,
    an impression that triggered a stream of additional
    impressions, and that plurality of impressions made
    it a portrait not of the lake, but of the mind that was
    perceiving it, which was the more important subject
    anyway.
    And that’s a fair description of the inner workings
    of The Wings of the Dove ,composed almost entirely of streaming minds depicted in the process of anticipating
    events, and then—after a jump—reflecting on those
    same events having already happened. Actual events are
    snipped away as neatly as “gig” from “whirligig.” The
    theater lights on the foreground action have dimmed,
    and a bright spotlight searches and darts among the
    shadows of consciousness in the background.
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    But what of the larger matter that Wm had called for,
    and had kept on calling for? As early as 1, reacting
    to Wm’s pleas for a real story, H’ry admitted to being
    intimidated by overly dramatic plots:
    It comes from modesty & delicacy . . . or at least
    from the high state of development of my artistic
    conscience, which is so greatly attached to form
    that it shrinks from believing that it can supply
    it properly for big subjects, & yet it is constantly studying the way to do so; so that at least, I am
    sure, it will arrive.
    He seems to have been thinking of this exchange thirty
    years later when he began his preface to The Wings of the Dove with the claim that the story stemmed from a
    “very old—if I shouldn’t perhaps say a very young—
    motive.” He worried that the story of a dying girl
    would seem like a shortcut to drama, but he reminded
    his readers that Milly Theale’s tragic state was “but half the case, the correlative half being the state of others
    as affected by her.” How exactly this worked was the
    entire point, and he advised his readers to take careful
    note of his “positively close and felicitous application
    of method.” What method? Even in the preface this
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    is described with extended water metaphors. Charac-
    ters’ consciousnesses will be “decanted” for us. We will
    find ourselves “saturated” with sensibilities. The plot
    “comes to a head.” Compared to a simple travelogue,
    this particular experience of Venice is a “deeper draught out of a larger cup.” Milly Theale’s terminal fate creates all around her “very much that whirlpool of movement
    of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vessel.”
    The book takes it even further. A profession of love
    is likened to “a tide breaking through,” and language
    itself feels like “plashes of a slow, thick tide.” Imagi-
    nation has a “high-water” mark, and confusion feels
    like butting up “against a firm object in the stream.” A
    desire to confess is likened to an impulse to “overflow”
    from a “deeper reserve,” and even Merton Densher
    muses that a moment of anxiety would be best “lik-
    ened to the rapids of Niagara.” It’s Densher, too, who
    recognizes that each of the characters’ various streams
    of thought stem from a single source and flow toward
    a common reservoir:
    All of which . . . sharpened his sense of
    immersion in an element more strangely than
    agreeably warm—a sense that was moreover,
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    during the next two or three hours, to be fed
    to satiety by several other impressions. . . .
    There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for
    some than for others; what he, at any rate,